Jesse Oxfeld

It’s not great, but it’s very good—an entirely entertaining and enjoyable two and a half hours in the theater. And as a clearly commercial-minded venture, designed to bring in tourist audiences and deliver a long run, it ably, if not perfectly, delivers the Big Broadway Show experience.

The only dramatic tension ginned up is that Johnny Cash plans to leave Sun and sign with Columbia, but he can’t bring himself to tell Phillips. Finally, he does, and Phillips is angry. Briefly. Then they have a drink, all is forgiven and it’s time for the finale. The set—the Sun studio, done up in red leather and silver crown moldings, like a hip steakhouse—disappears, and the band rocks through a final five tracks. This, at last, is what you’re here for, and it only took about 90 minutes to arrive.

The script by Mr. Ludwig—who also wrote Crazy for You and Moon Over Buffalo—is carefully and cleverly constructed. But at two and a half hours, including intermission, it’s also too long, especially in the latter half of the first act, when the scenes, and the slapstick, seem to drag on. Mr. Tucci makes his debut as a stage director with this show, and he does excellent work with the comedy, especially the well-choreographed physical bits—it’s not every day that you see audience members literally throwing their heads back and guffawing, as they did, frequently, at the performance I attended. But, still, there’s that pacing problem: The show would be better if Mr. Tucci kept it moving faster, perhaps by trimming some of the script.

The play is didactic, but, then, Rothko was a didact, which makes him an ideal conduit for Mr. Logan’s arguments. “I am not your rabbi, I am not your father, I am not your shrink, I am not your friend, I am not your teacher—I am your employer,” Rothko tells Ken upon hiring him. But he can’t help himself: He discourses on philosophy, on literature, on painting. “Most of painting is thinking,” he says. Rothko prides himself and his generation on having vanquished the Cubists, but he rails against the rising Pop artists, against change.

But, as much I enjoyed the play, I couldn’t really buy it, because I don’t buy Adam and Luke’s relationship. There are lovely and tender scenes between the two, but their worldviews are so different—and so much time is spent fighting about that—that’s it’s tough to see how they ever made it to a third date.

A Behanding in Spokane is laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s also a bit disappointing. Unlike many of Mr. McDonagh’s earlier works, equally funny and typically gorier, it doesn’t seem to have any deeper point than the comedy. It’s also the first time he has set a play in the United States, which I think detracts: The skewed worlds he creates make sense on a remote, fog-shrouded Irish island; in a nondescript American city, the unreality bumps up against reality. And he doesn’t quite have an ear for American dialect: His working-class grafters use plenty of “ain’ts,” but they also use a few “mightn’ts.”

Maybe you liked Hal Prince’s original staging of A Little Night Music better. Fine, you were blown away by Judi Dench’s interpretation of Desirée in London in 1995. But the new revival of Night Music, which opened at the Walter Kerr Sunday night—the first Broadway production since its 1973 premiere, though it has been mounted several times by the City Opera—is a fantastic night at the theater, an entrancing, lovely, delightfully cast production of a Stephen Sondheim classic.

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than 'Keep Your Pantheon,' the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

The modern-dance giant Bill T. Jones has directed and choreographed. It is his first outing as a theater director and his second as a Broadway choreographer (following the hit repressed-German-teens-singing-indie-rock musical Spring Awakening). He creates a dizzying party onstage, giving his performers athletic, frenzied, propulsive and suggestively butt-centric dances. Catwalks extend into the orchestra seats, and dancers regularly head into the aisles. (Set designer Marina Draghici has extended the poster-covered corrugated steel that marks the walls of the Shrine into the house, too, turning the entire theater into the club.)